Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Shorter George W. Bush:
I'm Such a Big Person That I Take Responsibility, Even Though It Wasn't My Fault.

Bush's faux admission of responsibility for the Iraq debacle is truly nauseating. It's a blatant attempt to simultaneously (a) deny responsibility and (b) try to make himself look like a stand-up guy who's taking responsibility for the errors of others. He blames the decision on faulty intelligence, but fails to take responsibility for his part in this mess by failing to admit that it was his administration that put pressure on the intelligence agencies, filtered the information until it suited them and then exaggerated it.

God these people are beneath my disgust.

4 Comments:

Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I read it more as, "I'm sorry you're so upset about the bad intelligence, and we do need to fix the system, but Saddam needed whacking anyway for a number of reasons and I'd do it again."

In the cited article, notice how CNN buries the turnaround in public opinion that now no longer thinks the war was a mistake:

Meanwhile, 48 percent of respondents to a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll said they thought it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq, as opposed to 54 percent of those polled last month. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percent. Fifty percent said it was not a mistake, compared to 45 percent last month.

(I don't mean to claim the poll itself is significant, as it falls within the margin of error. I just wanted to point out that the turnaround is the most newsworthy feature of the poll, and is unremarked upon. Intentional? I think mebbe. The phrasing should have been that those who thought the war was a mistake are now statistically in the minority. That would be a straightforward accounting of the facts.)

5:19 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

More-or-less consistent with my reading: pretending to take responsibility but not really doing so. Reaganesque in its duplicity.

Thing is, the American people are dumb/uninformed enough to fall for it. Jesus, democracy is a dicey business...

Wake me up when he takes responsibility for the things he actually did, the things those of us who are paying attention are really pissed off about.

And as for the polls: yeah, that liberal CNN...they sure do have it in for W...

Rebounding up to 40% from 35 isn't really much of a story. You'd have to be Ghengis Khan to stay below 40% in this country for very long. You get 40% of the vote just by having 'Republican' next to your name. The big news is that he ever dropped *below* that...

But who cares what the uninformed among us think? Those of us who have been paying attention know very well what's been going on.

Jeez, doesn't like 40% of the public still think that Nixon got a raw deal?

9:48 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's all quite clear, really.

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/zen-of-iraq-todays-koan-comes-to-us.html

10:30 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

WS, your respective fight-or-flight postings about Republicans and Democrats make me think what you really long for is the post-WWII consensus. I miss it, too.

2:09 PM  

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